IT Unlike Any Other

First look: Hyper-V 2012 targets VMware’s air supply

This looks pretty interesting:

With the release of Windows Server 2012 yesterday, Microsoft significantly updated its Hyper-V virtualization platform. Available both as part of Server 2012 and as a free as in beer standalone installation, the third generation of Hyper-V brings with it a collection of features that largely commoditize the sorts of things you’ve gotten used to having to pay extra for. There are even a few features you couldn’t do at all with other hypervisors like live migration of a server from one server to another with no shared storage between the two.

Hyper-V supports a host of high-availability and “resiliency” features, such as off-site replication of servers. And it does many of those things as well or better than offerings from VMware and Citrix—regardless of whether you’re virtualizing Windows servers, Windows desktops, or Linux. And then there’s the free part: while the licenses for Windows Server itself are tied to a specific set of hardware, other operating systems can be hosted on the standalone Hyper-V server and managed as part of the same environment. All with the same sort of manageability.

Big boost in capacity, too:

Hyper-V 2012 can now handle significantly more substantial virtual hosts than its predecessor, making it possible to virtualize even some of the biggest workloads you may have running on physical servers. Hyper-V 2012, both on Windows Server 2012 and in standalone, can manage up to 320 logical processors and 4 terabytes of RAM; the virtual hosts running within the hypervisor can be configured with up to 64 virtual processors and a terabyte of RAM, and virtual disks can be configured to sizes ranging up to 64 terabytes (thanks to the new VHXD format for virtual drives, introduced in Server 2012). A single instance of Hyper-V can run up to 1,024 active virtual machines.